(Continuing the immigration discussion – promoted by jsw)

This diary is a survey of how immigration is playing out in state politics as opposed to D.C. or the streets. Cross posted at Happening-Here

Many of us who lean to the progressive side of things are enjoying the spectacle of national Republicans killing off their future prospects among Latino voters. They let their outright racists, like Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, set the party’s legislative agenda. Tancredo and his buddy James Sensenbrunner of Wisconsin want to make our undocumented working class into felons. That’s going to alienate even Latinos who think immigrants should play by the book. 

What nobody seems to get is that most undocumented people are uncles or cousins or even wives of someone with legal status. Not to mention that their children are U.S. citizens. Where the exclusionists see Mexican invaders, Latinos see their families. Guess who wins that one — and how they will vote when they are eligible?

So how does this play in California where we’ve been living inside these issues for years? In 1994, Pete Wilson played with this fire, won the re-election battle by pushing for the anti-immigrant Prop. 187, and the Republicans have been losing the war ever since as Latinos jumped firmly into the Democratic camp.

The frightening reality is that if Prop. 187 were offered to California voters today, it would probably pass again, though perhaps with less than 60 percent of the vote. Anti-immigrant measures reflect white fear that their country and culture is being engulfed by newcomers who speak foreign languages and have different lifestyles.  But although California has passed the demographic tipping point at which white people ceased to be the majority (no ethnic groups has a majority these days), the electorate remains about 75 percent white. Most voters are older, better off, and more educated than non-voters; these are the characteristics of the white California population. Also many immigrants have not yet jumped the hurdles on the way to citizenship. So the Anglo vote remains dominant.

Anti-immigrant ballot measures remain a cheap way for Anglo California to say: “My state is changing and I’m scared.” Fortunately we are not facing any current restrictionist ballot measures. But we probably will again, and for the time being, they may very well pass.

Meanwhile, this year, California politicians have simply tried to make immigration go away as a topic of political dialogue. Once singed, few want to go back to the racial animosity of the mid-1990s. 

Gov. Arnold says “I’ll let the geniuses in Washington figure all that out.” His Republican base certainly wants more: in 2003 he let them know that he voted for Prop. 187; last year he flirted briefly with supporting the Minutemen vigilantes, then backed off. He has a quandary because anti-immigrant policies not only turn off Latinos, but also independent women of all races, another large electoral bloc with whom he has some problems.

Some California Republicans are less careful. State Sen. Tom McClintock, who is running for lieutenant governor, accused President George W. Bush of failing to protect U.S. borders and said illegal aliens should be deported. “There’s nothing radical about that,” said McClintock, R-Thousand Oaks.”

And the Minuteman founder Jim Gilchrist, running as a Conservative for congress in the San Diego suburbs, has been fanning the flames.

“I don’t want to sound paranoid, but when you see hundreds of thousands of people rallying around a foreign flag … it’s the next thing to foreign insurrection,” he said.

On the other hand, he says, Congress could spur an insurrection from the anti-illegal immigration side if it approves a plan that would legitimize those now in the country illegally. …”I’m not going to promote insurrection, but if it happens, it will be on the conscience of the members of Congress who are doing this,” he said. “I will not promote violence in resolving this, but I will not stop others who might pursue that.”

Meanwhile, the Democrats dueling for the opportunity to take on Arnold have been ducking to the best of their ability. Phil Angelides points out that he opposed Prop. 187. As someone involved in that campaign, I can testify that Democratic politicians who showed any spine in that fight were few and far between. I don’t remember his name, but that doesn’t say anything — he was not prominent in my circles.  His website doesn’t seem to mention the immigration at all, at least that I could find. No search function.

Aspiring Governor Steve Westly (website) has a section where visitors can give their opinions on immigration. His spokesman recently explained that Westly opposes HR 4437:

“It criminalizes undocumented workers in this country, which isn’t good for public safety, the budget or the problem of illegal immigration at all.”

Definitely advantage to Westly on immigration, simply by being prepared to address what folks are wondering about.

Oakland progressive policy advocate Frank Russo goes after Gov. Arnold about the many anti-immigrant measures introduced by Republican legislators — and suggests some measures he should support: drivers licenses for the undocumented so we can be sure they have insurance; in-state tuition in community colleges for undocumented young people who have graduated from California high schools; and development of a California Office of Immigrant Affairs. Democrats would be smart to come clean on these issues as well.

In 1994, older relatives of the current crop of Latino high school students took to the streets, much as we have been seeing over the last few days. California has begun to calm down over immigration — anyone who thinks the state is upset by recent walkouts and marches never knew or has forgotten how heated the atmosphere was 12 years ago. California is working out how to be one of the most diverse societies the world has ever seen. Eventually the pols will catch up with the people.

(I saw this at janinsanfran’s own blog, Happening-Here, and asked her to cross-post it here. Thanks, Jan. – promoted by jsw)

Cross posted at Happening-Here

I am currently working with the Progressive Technology Project on curricula for community groups that want to involve themselves in elections. Don’t worry — we do try to make sure they know and observe the legal rules. In California, with proper reporting to the IRS and various election authorities, there are roles these groups can and should take working on ballot measures.

Our project is to get them into a more appropriate mindset for the tasks ahead and that takes some doing. We’ll be teaching some of the concepts in this post. Comments and suggestions are very welcome.

Community groups frequently come to electoral work with all sorts of misgivings, but seldom with an understanding of the most important fact about elections: elections are almost certainly different from anything your organization is ordinarily doing. You are about to play in a new game with unfamiliar rules.

It probably doesn’t look that way at first: after all, getting lots of people together, raising money, talking to the press, convincing people of your point of view — that’s what you do all the time. On the surface electoral work looks similar, but it usually is not. Here’s why:

1) Elections are a zero sum game, a war conducted by non-lethal means. One side wins and the other loses. Generally moral victories don’t count (though a good showing in a losing cause in a particular location can increase your influence with local politicians.) Elections are a fight, and not necessarily a fair one. Any legal tactic that wins votes is not only considered acceptable; among elections professionals, tactics that skirt legality and flaunt amorality sometimes win admiration. (Just look at Rove.)

This warlike thinking is out of sync with the mind set and culture of most grassroots advocacy and service groups and even with some quite assertive community organizations. People often come together precisely to reduce the amount of struggle in their lives; many of us are explicitly engaged in violence prevention or conciliation. We tend to work on bringing people together, not separating them out and driving them apart onto their respective “teams.” Yet separating friends from enemies must be done in an election. Enemies using the political process can and have launched attacks which assault our core values, such as tax cuts for the rich or Bush’s war. Once in the electoral arena, we only hurt ourselves if we fail to learn and appreciate the rules of this new game. Only after we have mastered the ordinary rules can we meaningfully decide how far we are willing to go in adopting unfamiliar and sometimes distasteful methods.

2) Good electoral organizing is wide, not deep: some might even say shallow and superficial. If your organization prides itself on having a nurturing culture, this can come hard. 

Campaigns must move huge numbers of people in a very short time to perform one simple act: to cast a ballot our way. You will never have the time or resources to conduct deep organization or education with your voters, or even with all the people who work on the campaign.

With people reached as voters, all you have to do is make sure they are on your side and then make sure they vote.

With people reached as volunteers (some of them found while doing voter contact), all you have to do is make sure they are willing to carry out some phase of your program. At least initially, you don’t care why they are willing to work on your campaign. Obviously you want to listen to the volunteers you attract (you might learn a lot about what moves people to your side) and try to win volunteers to your political perspective. But mostly you simply have to recognize that you’ll be taking people as they come.

You can however, train your leaders to try to identify people you meet while working on the election who might become organization members of supporters — afterward!

3) Elections make strange bed fellows. The “wide not deep” principle applies to allied groups as well as individuals. Campaigns force you to work in broad coalitions where anyone who agrees with you on a particular issue must be brought to the table. Suddenly, you could find yourself on the same team as the police union or the Chamber of Commerce. For the duration of the campaign, on the one issue the campaign is about, these people become your friends. It can be unsettling.

But if you are going to work in elections, you don’t have much choice about who you work with. Sure, you would kick the KKK out of a coalition. But to get a majority of votes, you are almost certainly going to have to work with allies who are either unfamiliar or even distasteful. Your allies will not share all your values. But probably to assemble a majority of votes, there will be groups in your coalition that represent a rough community majority.

The better you understand the necessities of electoral organizing, the better able you’ll be to navigate: you’ll learn neither to make compromises with your new-found “friends” which will be destructive to your organization’s objectives after this round is over, nor, alternatively, to turn away genuine help which comes from an unexpected source. At times groups who could not be in the same room can work on parallel tracks toward a common goal. Knee jerk politics cannot stand these kinds of arrangements, but if you are going to work in elections, you have to learn not to make quick judgments about who is there with you.

4) Sometimes your friends are NOT your friends. Elections are the place in our society in which governmental power and its related perks get distributed. Community groups usually get involved in initiative campaigns because they care about issues, especially when issues on the ballot directly impact their members and constituencies. But most experienced players in the election game are there for power. Their own power. They may genuinely be on your side, but their interests in the situation are their own, not yours. And elections are usually their turf, not yours. This can lead them to behave in ways that are at best surprising to community groups and at worst can sabotage your efforts.

Progressive community groups especially need to be aware of three varieties of friends who are sometimes not friends: politicians, professional campaign consultants, and the trade unions.

Politicians: The primary business of most politicians is to get re-elected to their present office or elevated to a higher office. Sure, some of them routinely vote your way and a very few of them genuinely support you on the issues. You almost certainly know who they are. When confronted with a hostile ballot measure, many community groups instinctively turn to politicians for advice about how to maneuver in an election; after all, elections are what politicians do.

This impulse is not wrong. If they want to help, politicians have the contacts and staff, know the ropes (and the donors), and can command media attention to your side of an issue. But unless you are clearly winning, by which time you need them less, most politicians are going to be very careful about forcefully aligning themselves with you. For them, the costs and dangers are greater than the potential benefits. They risk pissing off your opponents and probably won’t lose the support of your supporters if they merely give lip service to your side.

Politicians’ lip service can be deceptive. They certainly don’t want you to know that they aren’t going to make a serious effort, so you may get lots of unfulfilled promises. It is appropriate and in your long-term interest to be very demanding of politicians who claim to back you; even if you don’t get much, politicians who discover during the heat of a campaign that you are not pushovers will treat your issues more respectfully later.

Everything said about politicians goes double for the Democratic Party. Look out for lip service to your issue that is not backed up by any helpful action. If fact, be on the look out for sabotage; if community groups really mobilized to be influential in elections, they could out-organize the moribund structures of the party in most areas.

Professional campaign consultants: These folks are literally in the business advising or running election campaigns. Some of them (probably a minority) are very good at their work. All of them who will talk to you at all (consultants don’t like dicey, highly charged, poorly compensated initiatives) will impress you with how much more they know about these things than you do.

Unless you have a lot of money, it is going to be very hard for you to make good use of the consultants you borrow or hire. Here are some things to think about when evaluating consultant advice:

Who is paying the consultant? If it is not you, you should be looking for the consultant’s advice to serve the interests of whoever is paying the bills — which may be slightly different from yours (see remarks on politicians and unions).  In particular, the consultant’s next job will likely come from candidates, not you, so they are likely to be looking out for interests in addition to yours.

Does the consultant’s advice fit the issue and your community? Community groups may not know elections, but they do know why issues move their base to action. Consultants know how to assemble majorities for candidates; they don’t necessarily know the communities and the concerns you do. They are likely to think that media, money, and endorsements from politicians are the be-all and end-all of the campaign. You may know however that there are endorsements you can get from religious or professional leaders that would be far more influential on your issue. For example, an immigrant rights group that encourages citizenship will very likely have a far better idea of what moves new citizens to vote than a consultant. Don’t ever let a consultant run over your ideas, especially when yours come out of your genuine area of expertise. You might just have something to teach the consultant.

The Unions: Unions are the most powerful repository of political expertise (and the largest source of funds) on the progressive side of things in the current United States. Very often, they are the best friends we have. They are also not simple or easy allies for community groups.

You need to understand that although by and large the top leaders of many unions understand the value of community alliances and are mildly progressive, they have to worry about taking positions that seem far-out to their members. Many unions have very little interaction with their members apart from immediate work issues and consequently the members may well harbor all the prejudices found in the general public. Or union leaders may think their members have those attitudes — real back and forth between the members and leaders is rare. So union political leadership may be very cautious about getting involved with a controversial position advocated by a community group.

Moreover, unions that are good at the political game are usually heavily invested in particular politicians. They have put their money and their people into getting these politicians elected and they get concrete help for their members in return. These relationships, these sitting politicians, are much more important to the unions than anything you are working on. So though they may support you ideologically, they will always be looking out for the interests of their politicians. If your effort threatens the election or re-election of their candidates, look for lip service, token contributions, or well-meaning advice that amounts to downplaying the inflammatory content of your issues. Be warned and be grateful for what you do get that you can use.

Some of this material was first developed for use by Californians for Justice.

(Campaign Finance Reform and Unions are going to be hot topics in 2006, and this is an interesting take. – promoted by jsw)

Cross posted at Happening-Here

The news appeared this morning that Martin Ludlow is stepping down from his post as head of the Los Angeles County Labor Federation hoping to avoid jail time in a scandal involving union money that illegally helped his 2003 campaign for the City Council. No one seems to be contesting the prosecutor’s core assertions: SEIU Local 99 put some campaign workers on its payroll and ran some phone banks, giving Ludlow $53,000 worth of help that it didn’t report. That is the crime.

Now there is no doubt this is illegal. Multiple levels of campaign law, local and state, place limits on and require disclosure of sources of election help. And violating those laws frequently leads to stiff fines. There are very few career politicians who haven’t at least been investigated for some reporting irregularity. But what makes Ludlow’s case special is that union political contributions are governed by additional federal law giving the Department of Justice and the FBI authority to step in with criminal sanctions. The LA Times reports concerns about the federal involvement:

Ludlow has run afoul of a section of the United States Code titled “fiduciary responsibility of officers of labor organizations.” In particular, according to sources, Ludlow was investigated by the federal government for conspiring to embezzle money, property or other assets from a labor organization.

The regulation of unions has long been the domain of the federal government. …Labor unions have complained that they are being singled out and constrained in a way that their natural opponents, the business community, are not. Such protests have only increased under President Bush, some legal scholars say.

I’m sorry, if this had been a corporation, the activity of hiring campaign workers for a friendly candidate wouldn’t have been treated as “embezzlement” from the stockholders — it would have been applauded as a good investment. And I am sure Ludlow’s being Black didn’t help either.

Ludlow’s departure from the LA County Fed is bad news. He’s been a close ally of progressive mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. His accession to the job following the untimely death of Miguel Contreras signaled the strength of the “Black-Brown” alliance that is trying to set LA politics on a new course and model new possibilities for Democrats nationally. That current is so strong that it can likely survive the departure of one leader, but it is hard not to wonder whether we aren’t seeing here that Republicans in power know a real threat when they see it.

The whole ugly mess should also be a warning to progressives enamored of various campaign finance gimmicks they hope will “level the playing field.” Tinkering at the edges of how cash comes into campaigns with donation limits and partial spending caps simply disadvantages candidates and groups that start with less money. These campaign finance reform practices require people who run for office to hire armies of lawyers, accountants and specialist consultants to ensure that they stay legal. For rich candidates, this is just a cost of doing business. For insurgents, compliance with “ethics commissions” and “fair political practices” regulators is a drain on funds that should go to voter contact.

There are forms of “campaign finance reform” that would work better. The right of rich candidates to self-finance without limit (Buckley v. Valeo) must be made subject to regulation or we are further on our way to plutocracy. “Clean Elections” schemes that give state financing under regulated conditions (versions exist in Maine and Arizona) have shown promise.

But progressives need to be very careful about simply jumping on the latest “campaign finance” bandwagon. Elections are about who has power. Money will get into them because money is power. We’d be crazy to hamstring ourselves.

Cross posted at Happening-Here

The San Francisco Chronicle is doing a huge service to the people of the city with its current series, “Use of Force,” documenting and describing the pattern of brutal behavior by a some of officers of the San Francisco Police Department.

The Chron has done what the city government ought to have done a long time ago: using public records, they have complied a data base of use of force reports, citizen complaints against police, and settlements payments by the city to injured citizens. The picture isn’t pretty:

San Jose’s department, about 60 percent San Francisco’s size, studied its citizen-filed force complaints at The Chronicle’s request and found that from 1996 through 2003 the officer with the most complaints had four, while nine officers had three. Seventy officers had two complaints, and 566 officers had one.

In San Francisco during the same period, the officer with the most unnecessary-force complaints had 26. Another had 20; one had 18, 4 had 15 and 3 had 13 the Office of Citizen Complaints records show.

While San Jose reveals only a few incidents, the SFPD keeps and promotes officers who use force improperly. There can be no other conclusion.

Nothing in “Use of Force” is much of a surprise to residents of the poorer, blacker and browner neighborhoods of the city or to political activists. A few memorable incidents in a long catalogue of SFPD misconduct include

• the 1989 Castro Street Sweep in which 200 San Francisco police officers swept through the Castro and broke up a peaceful march by gay and lesbian activists protesting the federal government’s neglect of people with AIDS;…only one police officer was disciplined, but the city paid out $250,000 to settle lawsuits brought by victims.

• the police beating of United Farm Workers Vice President Dolores Huerta that ruptured her spleen;

• the fatal shooting of 17 year old Sheila Detoy by cops who were trying to arrest a drug dealer. Community activists spent years trying to get the shooter disciplined, while the city paid out a wrongful death settlement of $505,000 to her family.

What will be telling is whether the Chronicle uses its series to push for any remedies with bite. Some of what is needed is obvious:

1) Put in place a system of reporting that forces the SFPD to acknowledge that a few cops cause most of the complaints.

2) Fix or fire those officers, pronto. Simply doing those two things would be incredibly cost effective — whatever a new computer reporting system and the training to use it would cost, it has to be less than the city pays in settlements to police misconduct victims.

So why won’t the obvious get done? Here’s where things get rough.

3) The police brass is riddled with officers who are willing to look the other way when cops use excessive force. It may have seemed a little over the top a few years ago when D.A. Terrance Hallinan indicted the whole command structure of the department over the chief’s son beating up a bartender. Hallinan didn’t have the evidence to make the charges stick. Nonetheless, the clubby chain of command where bad apples rise in rank makes reform nearly impossible.

4) Unhappily, the Police Officers Association (POA) is part of the problem. The current head of the union, Gary Delagnes, wracked up over 100 complaints of misconduct himself before rising to his current job.

5) And this points to the final, possibly fatal, obstacle to police reform: the city’s political ruling class apparently doesn’t mind seeing the SFPD out of control in its treatment of brown, black and uppity citizens. And so successive mayors have appointed chiefs acceptable to the existing command and the union. Willie Brown changed the race of the police brass, but did nothing to rock the boat. Gavin Newsom appointed a Chinese American woman chief, but so far has not used his clout to stop misconduct. It remains to be seen whether he’ll act after this Chronicle series, since the POA has long been a political supporter.

On the front page of today’s Chron, next to the “Use of Force” story, a headline reads “Push to open up mayor’s races in S.F.” In recent years, deluges of corporate and developer money of dubious legality have flooded San Francisco mayoral contests. The current mayor spent $5.7 million to win the office against a more progressive opponent who spent less than a million and still got 47 percent of the vote. The two previous mayoral elections were dominated by Willie Brown’s ability to leverage vast funds to bury progressive challengers.

Gavin Newsom is probably guaranteed another term (he is popular) but the public financing plan now before the city council might change the electoral terrain after he leaves office. A more equitably financed electoral system might enable a future mayor to confront the culture of police brutality that has long festered in corners of the SFPD. Without political change, the SFPD will continue to get away with periodically beating people up and the city will go on paying settlements.